Lead with the goal: plan your project in reverse

Everyone would be successful if things just worked out. We'd have world peace, a perpetual motion machine, and a fat loss plan that requires no exercise.

In IT, I have a name for the box on the process diagram where things "just happen": PFM, or Pure F'in Magic. It's a popular box. Unfortunately, PFM is no substitute for knowing what you're trying to do and planning how to get there.

Open any trade magazine for the evidence: projects delivered late, over budget, or not at all. In the Project Management Institute's 2015 Pulse of the Profession study, only 64 percent of projects were successful, and three of the top four reasons for failure came down to not fully understanding the goal.

So how do leaders avoid the trap? Lead with the goal. Understand it, schedule backward from it, tell everyone, and don't let up.

Understand the goal

Imagine driving from Los Angeles to New York with no map and no street signs. You figure that if you keep heading east, you'll get there eventually. More likely you end up somewhere else, or nowhere at all.

If you don't know the objective, your organization can't achieve it. Before anything else, answer these questions:

• What does the goal look like when it's done?
• What can be seen or measured that proves you've reached it?
• How will each group of stakeholders perceive it?
• How much time do you have?
• What constraints, dependencies, or regulations apply?

Take your time with this. Meet with stakeholders more than once. Sleep on it. Fill every whiteboard in the building. The more important the goal, the more of this work it deserves.

Then write it all down in what I call a Goal Book. Think of the binder a bride-to-be carries around: quotes, pictures, schedules, seating charts, everything about the event in one place. Your Goal Book does the same job, and no, it doesn't have to be an actual binder.

Build the schedule in reverse

The usual approach is to list every task, have the people doing the work estimate each one, add it all up, and arrive at a completion date.

Here's the problem. If you know project managers and estimators as well as I do, you know most of them pad by 20 percent or more. Some of that is prudence, some is undocumented work, and some is plain laziness. It all pushes the date out.

So do it backward. Set the end date first, then work your way back to today, filling in the tasks. Now every task has to earn its place. If it isn't critical to success, drop it, delegate it, or outsource it. Keep control of the critical ones.

A schedule built this way will be tight, and that's the point. You get the best from people when you push on what's possible. If something proves impossible, adjust, but only as a last resort. Often a little more money or a few more people on one specific task will hold the line.

And if money or quality is your hard limit, the schedule has to give. As the old project manager's adage goes: good, cheap, or fast. Pick two.

Tell everyone, then tell them again

With the plan in hand, sell it to everyone it touches. Play up the benefits, name the risks, and say how you'll handle them. Sponsors should agree to the schedule and deliverables. The people doing the work should agree the tasks are reasonable. Customers should know what they're getting and when.

Publish the schedule and keep it current. Not everyone needs every detail. Customers want milestones, not your task list.

Use more than one channel: a company-wide email, a town hall, the newsletter, a project site, a standing meeting. Skywriting and singing telegrams are also available. Match the medium to the audience, then communicate, communicate, and communicate some more.

Be relentless

A goal and a plan are nothing without execution. A project is like a car: take your foot off the throttle and it rolls to a stop. Keep the Goal Book close, keep the teams energized, and keep stakeholders informed.

Above all, resist scope creep. Small requests will bury you. Push them to version two. If you can, lay some groundwork now, the way you'd rough in plumbing in an unfinished basement so nobody has to jackhammer the floor later.

All the work you put into the Goal Book, the schedule, and the communication is at risk if you stop reinforcing it. Lead with the goal, and keep leading with it until it's done.

A longer version of this article first appeared on LinkedIn in 2016. Read the original there.